David Cormack
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Is it even a labour party if they're not supporting labour?
🕑 Added 2021-05-05 22:21:07 +0000 UTCYesterday the Government, which we need to remember is *just* the Labour Party, announced it's putting a wage freeze on the public sector for three years.
In a coup for its communications team it was largely reported that this would be a wage freeze for those earning over $100,000. Except it's not. For those earning over $60,000 they will only get an increase to their salary in "exceptional circumstances." So it's basically a wage freeze on anyone earning over $60k.
That includes teachers. Nurses. Firefighters. and others.
Pretty shit to be honest.
Working for the public sector is not sexy. It's often not interesting. And you sure don't get perks.
I remember when I worked for a government dept, and we had our staff Christmas party in the basement, which also doubled as the car park. The CEO of the Dept came to give a speech thanking us all, then got in his car and the party had to part like the Red Sea to allow him to drive off. And then because there was a spending limit of like $25 per head, we ran out of booze. People had to go to a supermarket to buy more for themselves. It was pretty fucking grim.
Imagine waking up today knowing that if you stayed at your public sector job, no matter how well you did, no matter how well the overall economy was doing, you would get no pay increase.
Which works out to be an effective pay cut when you take inflation into account.
Imagine waking up with that knowledge when just a few days ago it was reported that the Government had "saved" nearly a billion dollars from its Covid recovery fund and you would still not face a pay increase in three years.
Between this depressing bit of news and the new top tax rate of $180,000 coming in, it seems this government has a hard-on for penalising income. But refuses to do anything about taxing wealth. Which means our asset hoarding classes continue to benefit while the workers get fucked.
What the hell sort of Labour party is this?
This is just further proof that the system is not broken. Our current economic model is designed to benefit a small amount of people in a massive way while disadvantaging the masses by keeping them on a small amount.
This Government has had a crisis unlike any other to stare down. And the health response has been admirable. But they've also had an opportunity from this crisis to redesign how our economy works.
But they really haven't taken that opportunity. They've spent a lot of time trying to appease "business". Business isn't even an actual thing. When we say "business", we mean CEOs and boards who are duty-bound to do as much as possible to get as high a share price as possible. And one of the ways to do that is to pay your workers bugger all.
So you want to keep them happy? Don't do anything for the workers. That gets your business confidence surveys looking rosy.
After the announcement of the new Health NZ system I thought maybe we'd turned a corner and we'd start to see bigger, braver more left-wing policies.
But we haven't. We've just seen more of what National would have given us. It's so bleak.
Comments
David Cormack
Fuck, you're right. It does feel Hughes like.
Ben
In practical terms it won’t be a freeze for a while as agreements are already in place. There will be ways around it I’m sure. But the optics are terrible I’m not sure where their heads are at on it. It does seem like a Peter Hughes idea though
David Cormack
But where you gonna go eh? Captive Market and all that.
Joe Stockman
This feels seismic - I still can't believe that a Labour government has committed to four years (the freeze year + 3) of effective pay cuts for circa 400,000 workers and their families. Austerity isn't how you get yourself out of an economic crisis, and it felt like we'd learned that. Sadly, no.
